“This is cheating,” Velik said as he drove his spear through the skull of some sort of furred bipedal monster that was seven feet tall and probably weighed three hundred pounds of solid muscle. It was the hundredth monster he’d killed in the last two minutes, but every time one died, a cage that had been previously empty and open somehow swung open again, releasing a new monster.

The dungeon seemed to just be throwing monsters at him as quickly as it could. Some of them were as high as level 30, but those were the exception. Most of what he was killing was barely level 15 or 20. Velik wasn’t sure what the dungeon was trying to accomplish, or even if it was the dungeon’s decision at all. It could have been the champion he was supposedly fighting, but that thing hadn’t shown its face yet.

Is it just hoping I’ll get tired and make a mistake? It has to know by now that it’s not going to kill me like this.

A new monster popped into existence in the nearest cage—something vaguely bear-like in shape, but with a long, thin, prehensile, spiked tail and the face of a crocodile. Chimeras seemed to be a particular favorite of this particular dungeon, but it was as weak as everything else pouring into the arena. Velik left its remains splattered across the ground with a single strike.

Wave after wave of monsters assaulted Velik, so many that he soon found himself fighting on top of the bodies of those he’d already killed. There wasn’t a speck of floor in the entire arena that wasn’t painted with black blood, and an overwhelming odor of butchered meat filled the air. Finally, a few minutes later, the cages all stood empty. The monsters were dead and Velik was left standing there alone on a mound of corpses.

He didn’t get a chance to recover. A wet, schlopping sound started somewhere under the bodies, quickly picking up volume and intensity. Velik could physically see the monsters shifting as something moved beneath them. Then he realized they were disappearing. Like a whirlpool drawing a fleet of ships in, the dead monsters started sliding toward the center of the arena and vanishing.

Velik leaped backwards, keeping his distance just in case whatever was down there was interested in taking him, too. Within thirty seconds, he was standing back on dry stone, and the last of the bodies had vanished into what appeared to be some sort of wide, circular mouth in the floor. It flexed open and closed, undulating in a somewhat sickening manner as it loudly crunched on the bones of its meal.

I didn’t think it was possible, but this might actually be grosser than the flesh cave.

Though he wasn’t sure exactly what form it would take, Velik understood what was happening. Dungeons like this had a somewhat unique ability to rapidly shift monsters around, which allowed them to hurl seemingly endless waves at an intruder. It could then recycle all the mana released upon those monsters being killed—assuming they didn’t finish off the intruder first—to empower a champion up to far greater strength than it normally possessed.

Kulkorax the Pit Master was probably going to be a lot stronger than anything else Velik had fought in the last few months, but there was no telling if it would actually pose a challenge until the champion appeared. Hopefully, the mouth was a part of the dungeon and not the monster, otherwise Kulkorax was going to be better than a hundred feet tall.

A pair of arms reached up out of the hole, eight feet long and covered in black chitin. Bare red muscle made up the joints, like a piece of meat with the flesh peeled off. The monster leveraged itself up, pulling a body three times taller than Velik out of the mouth, where it crawled to its feet.

To call it human-shaped was true only in the strictest definition that it had two legs, two arms, a trunk, and a head. Otherwise, it was grotesquely misshapen, with shoulders ten feet wide and sharply sloped so that one sat significantly lower than the other. Chitinous plates covered it haphazardly, like they’d been glued on with a layer of some sort of slimy substance rather than grown naturally.

Where a face should have been was instead a singular, massive eye set off-center over a tri-hinged jaw. Stray tufts of hair clung to its meat-covered skull, held fast in the slime coating it was bathed in. That eye was completely black but for a single slit of white running vertically through the center, and it was focused exclusively on Velik.

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Whatever put this thing together did not know what it was doing, Velik thought to himself. Even the flesh beasts had been less disgusting than the thing standing in front of him. Is that… fur growing on its… Well, at least nothing is flopping around down there.

The monster planted feet the size of dinner tables, reared back, and whipped its arm forward. The limb stretched out to double, then triple its original length. Most of the new mass was red and black muscle, but the chitin plates spread as well, and in an instant, a hand with seven claws was raking the air in front of Velik.

He twisted to the side, narrowly dodging the swipe, and lashed out with his spear. The monster was too fast, though, and its hand was already gone. [Apex Hunter] thrummed in the back of Velik’s mind, warning him to expect strength to match the monster’s prodigious frame and speed almost too fast to keep up with.

A faint stinging sensation tingled on his cheek. It quickly grew into something painful enough that he scrubbed at the skin with his sleeve, but all that did was smear it around. Some sort of acidic slime coating, he realized. That’s going to make things complicated.

The monster didn’t give him any more time to think. It bounded forward in two great, lopsided leaps that were so ungainly it was a miracle it managed to land on its feet, but Velik barely had time to notice. He was too busy dodging the hammer blow coming down at his head from its intertwined fingers. More wary of the slime splatter now, he darted out of the way and responded by throwing one of his knives into the monster’s face.

He aimed for the eye, but it turned its head and caught the blade with its teeth. The [Telekinesis] enchantment on it tried to pull the knife free, only to fail when a barbed tongue slipped out and swallowed the weapon whole. With a gulp, the mouth stretched out into a self-satisfied smirk.

Oh, you son of a bitch.

All six knives that made up the Fangs of the Wind Dragon were enchanted to return to the bandoleer on their own after a few minutes. Presumably, this one would as well, but it had been heavily damaged when the monster chewed it up. If it didn’t come back in good shape, Velik was going to be pissed.

Then there was no time left to worry about it. The monster was moving again, its legs pumping through stuttering steps as its two arms flailed in rhythmic lashes that forced Velik to twist and dodge frantically. Whatever else he could say about the ugly thing, no one could accuse it of being slow. He parried a sudden lunge, one that almost tore through his stomach, then went flying when the attack turned into a sideways slam.

Acid burned across his arm and stomach, though it was muted where his enchanted shirt protected him. Velik slammed into the arena wall, a good fifty feet farther away from the champion, and he hit it hard enough to feel the stone crack behind his back. With a grunt, he landed on his feet, then looked up to see the massive fleshless monster charging at him. Each step boomed through the air and broke the floor, which wasn’t strong enough to handle its great weight.

He wasn’t going to win this fight just reacting to its attacks. It was time to fight back, and he was betting the champion would be a lot easier to handle once he blew off an arm or a leg with a [Dread Lance]. Velik leaped forward and threw himself into a slide under a swinging arm that was twisted in a way no creature with bones could ever hope to mimic, then he rolled to his feet and thrust his spear into the monster’s hip.

* * *

Torwin paused in the middle of descending down a chimney, one that had been home to a small colony of spiders the size of his face, and gripped the rough stone tighter. It wasn’t the first time the whole dungeon had shook, but that one was particularly bad.

Whatever Velik was doing, it was stressing the dungeon hard. For a dimensional dungeon where each part was a discrete location, there shouldn’t have been any sort of feedback. Torwin quietly laughed to himself. “Get ‘em,” he said. “Let this thing know it picked a fight with the wrong hunter this time.”

Suddenly, reality shunted him sideways. He fell through a wall that was solid a moment ago and landed inside of what looked like a giant bird cage made of stone. At the top was a softly shimmering orb that threw green light across the floor, hindered by tendrils of fog reaching in through the bars. The orb flashed once, then a beam cut through the mist and almost struck Torwin.

He threw himself out of the way, then brought his bow up to fire off an arrow imbued with [Shred]. All he needed was for the tip to penetrate the orb, but whatever it was, it was hard enough to deflect the shot. The orb flashed colors, changing from green to blue, and eight smaller beams all flashed out, then started strafing across the inside of the cage. The mist caught the light and started sparkling, and the temperature dropped precipitously.

Better end this fast if I don’t want to freeze to death.

Torwin reached into his quiver for another arrow.